Ebook pricing experiment: First (tiny) milestone passed

by Suw on January 11, 2012

Today I passed the first milestone in my ebook pricing experiment: I have sold as many copies of Argleton in the first 11 days of January as I sold in the four months it was available last year. However, and it’s a big however, I’ve made less than a quarter of the money in royalties than I would have if I’d kept the price the same. A further big however, however, is that the absolute numbers I’m talking about are tiny: 49 copies sold in the last four months of 2011, and 50 sold in the last 11 days.

Nonetheless it’s a milestone and I’ve passed it. The question remains now is how long it will take to pass the next one: to equal the amount of money in royalties that I made last year, estimated at £54.79. I know that’s a trifling amount but we all have to start somewhere.

Of course, these are actually unfair comparisons for two main reasons:

Lots of people got Kindles for Christmas that they want to fill with free/cheap content, so one would expect a sales spike in early January, which seems to be what I’ve seen. Sales have certainly decreased in the last few days.

Once I get to the end of January I’ll publish all my stats for comparison. I have to increase sales by an orders of magnitude or three before I really see a return, but I hope that one day these numbers will be the beginning of a rather attractive graph!

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